Author: Sarah

How can it possibly be Monday already? I spent almost the entire weekend working on my master’s project. As a result, I have absolutely no desire to be looking at a computer screen today, but unfortunately, that’s my job. :P At least I got a lot done. I’m planning on doing a demo for my advisor tomorrow, so I wanted to have it as polished as possible by then. There’s still a lot of work to do, but what’s there is really starting to look great!

In between bouts of frantic coding, we played a couple of games of Iron Dragon. It’s this really fun railroad game where you draw with crayons on a laminated board and go from city to city picking up and dropping off stuff. I lost both times, but it was still fun. Crayons are definitely a great break from the keyboard! Maybe I should buy a box for the office so I can color for a bit when I get tired of staring at the monitor…

TGIF!
Today is Denis’ birthday! We’re going out to a Japanese restaurant later for something I can’t spell. It sounds like “shabu-shabu”, but I’m sure that’s wrong – it really looks silly! Anyway, he had it in Japan, and has been dying to get it again ever since, so we found a place that actually serves it. We’ll see if it’s authentic or not.

I’m just so glad it’s Friday. I have been in a miserably crabby mood all week and I’m really happy that it’s almost over! Hopefully I’ll get lots more done on my master’s project this weekend, and be in a better mood on Monday. Well, Tuesday, since Monday is just not a good day to count on being in a good mood (especially with an 8am meeting!)

Missing!
I have totally lost a fleece vest. This morning as I was getting dressed I realized that I haven’t seen it in at least 2 months. I searched the entire house, top-to-bottom, to find it this morning. I even had Denis look in the trunks of the cars. Unless it ended up in the crawl-space attic, it’s gone. I can only hope I left it at someone’s house and they’ll read this and figure out that I left my vest there! It’s orange and brown and green, kind of a muted plaid. And it’s fleecy. With a hood. :( And it’s probably lost and lonely and wondering why it took me so long to figure out it was missing…

Cookiepalooza
I won best tasting cookie with my Chocolate Intrigues yesterday! Which is really cool. Except, I’ve gotten a number of snide comments from some people because last year I also won the chili cookoff. It was a blind vote both times, and I guess I really can’t help the fact that people like what I make. It kind of makes me not want to enter the next contest, because I don’t like to feel like I’ve done something wrong when I haven’t. It didn’t help that I was tied with someone else and the tie-breaking vote picked my cookies. I guess I’m just in a frumpy mood today. I think I’ll go home and walk it off with Molly…

Somebody found my blog with the search “final fantasy 8″ +”wallpaper” +”spaceship”… Are they really looking for wallpaper of the spaceship in final fantasy 8? Is there actually a spaceship in final fantasy 8? (And who would put up wallpaper of final fantasy 8, anyway?)

Watery Revelations
I think I should be paid for the time I spend in the shower. After all, my best ideas and solutions to problems occur to me there. Somewhere between rinsing the shampoo out of my hair and working in the conditioner this morning, I figured out how to solve something at work. Now I just have to find time between meetings to implement it. :P It’s definitely Monday!

You Can’t Always Get What You Want
…well at least according to the Rolling Stones. But the fortune in my fortune cookie asks you to suppose you can…

So what exactly does this mean? Where do you place the emphasis? If you read it “Suppose you can get what you want…” it means something different that “Suppose you can get what you want…”. And let’s not even get into the “…in bed” thing. Any ideas?

Spring is in the Air…
I just planted 62 bulbs. In an hour. That’s a bulb a minute! Of course, it’s January, so I’m not sure whether these bulbs will actually grow or not, but I figured I’d give it a try… The hyacinth bulbs looked a little off, though. It could be scary – I might end up with mutant hyacinths from outer space. (More likely though, they were rotting and won’t even come up, but we won’t know until spring…)

Why, exactly, am I planting bulbs in January? Well, we’ll leave the procrastination bit out of it, but it just happened that it was an absolutely balmy spring day today. It was bright and sunny and mild, and I just felt the need to go out and do something! Now I only have 50 tulip bulbs left from the rather ambitious number I bought in November…but those will have to wait for another day…it’s getting cold and dark again, and I’ve just remembered it’s winter. :)

The Ultimate Color
Incredible! The true color of the universe looks like it’s the same as the color of our wagon! I need to ponder what this means…

Home Improvement III
(coming soon to a theater near you)
Ahhh. The joys of home ownership… Lisa just put an offer in on a house; Jenny has a closing date this month… They have no idea what they’re in for. :) It seems like every year about this time we start calling contractors for some major work we need to do on our house. Roofing, siding, painting, driveways… The list apparently never ends. It’s amazing what you learn to live with (i.e. orange carpeting in the master bedroom) in order to spend the money where everyone else sees it – like siding. That’s this year’s project. Last year we hired people to paint the house – unfortunately, after they’d already scraped and sanded a good part of the house, we found out that the cardboard siding (ok, it’s probably not cardboard, but it really looks like it) was totally water damaged – even though the house was painted less than three years before. How? Who knows. Long story short, we decided that we’re taking a “vinyl siding vacation” this year. But first, we need to find a contractor. That is the absolute least fun part of any home improvement effort. You’re calling someone and offering them money to come to your home and make a mess. You would think that they would be prompt about calling back, right? Never. At most, we’ve had two contractors call us back ever for any type of job. So much for the “get three estimates” rule! Maybe this job will be better…or maybe I’ll need to be checked into an insane asylum by the end of it. Anyone out there get their house resided recently in the Rochester, NY area? I’m accepting references!